Mom said, “I see a family therapist in our future.”
Dad nodded, looked Justin straight in the eye, and said, “Speaking of family, let me make a phone call.” He got out his cell phone.
Justin stared, struck by the sight of the BlackBerry yet oddly comforted. “Is that your same old—”
“Some things stay the same but some things change.” Into the phone, his father said, “Hi, Dad, how is it going?”
Justin felt astonishment lift his head and his heart.
“Are Kyle and Kayla still up?”
“Grandpa?” Justin gasped.
Smiling with blessedly genuine warmth and ease, his father nodded at him. To the phone he said, “Listen, Dad, great news. You can tell them we found Justin.”
Justin could hear the joyful noise on the phone from where he sat. Three voices, one old and two young, yelling and crying. And a dog barking.
“Grandpa’s dog,” Mom told Justin, very matter-of-fact.
“Yes, he’s right here,” Dad was saying into the cellular. “Howsabout you put the phone on speaker?” He did the same at his end, then handed his BlackBerry over to Justin with a grin, assuring Justin he would do just fine.
“Hi, squirts,” he said, and in answer to the resultant clamor, “Yes, it’s me. I’ve been in a dungeon. It’s a long story. Grandpa?”
“Yes, Justin.” The elderly voice sounded all choked up. Unbelievable, to have a grandfather who cared about him waiting for him at home.
“Hi, Grandpa.”
“Justin, I’m so glad you’re coming home, I can’t see straight.”
“Um, good, I guess.” Trying to change the subject, Justin asked, “What’s your dog’s name?”
“Oliver.”
Kayla yelled, “And he likes Meatloaf!”
“You feed him meat loaf?”
For some reason everyone started laughing, and Justin laughed along with them without knowing why.
TWENTY-NINE
Descartes should have spent some time in Maypop Medical. Thinking had nothing to do with the definition of existence; here it was hello, I had a bowel movement, therefore I am. I’m afraid I was not a patient patient. Because Stoat had smashed my forearm rather thoroughly, I required surgery to pin the bones back in place, which had to wait until the swelling went down, so between that and a hairline fracture of my skull and a bruised spleen from being kicked and a few cracked ribs, I was stuck in the hospital for five days in order to heal. But I think the most important healing that took place there occurred between me and my sons.
“Where’s Schweitzer?” I remember asking none too lucidly. Those days I wasn’t quite firmly in residence in my own body. My face, cut and bruised with blackened eyes, made me barely recognizable to myself. Some sort of intravenous lotus juice dripping into me all the time kept me a bit muddled.
My sons exchanged glances. Forrest asked cautiously, “You mean Schweitzer’s body?”
“Yes.”
“We buried him in the front yard.”
“Oh. Good.” I meant good, Schweitzer had not been taken away by strangers or thrown into the garbage; Schweitzer had been interred by people who knew him and were fond of him. If I had tried to say any of this, I would have sounded like a maudlin drunk, so I dozed off—not an unusual occurrence. An image of a small grave in front of a pink house formed in my mind, but the pink house wasn’t my cute pink shack anymore. Some unseen hands of my mind pulled it into goo like taffy, a bloody gory mess. I woke up.
“I can’t live there anymore,” I said to no one except myself, and it was true. With a swampy feeling I realized I could never again feel comfortable in the fuchsia shack surrounded by fuzzy-blossomed mimosa trees. Not even if I bought a sofa cover and put down a new carpet. Every day when darkness fell, it would be as if my mind were spraying Luminol, and I would see blood fluorescing like soul rot. Schweitzer’s blood. My blood. And Stoat’s. I had either a fainting memory or a disturbing dream of his hot blood splashing all over me as he died.
“I can’t go back to that pink shack,” I told my sons the next time I saw them.
“Come back up north with us, then,” said Forrie. “We’ll find you someplace to live where you won’t run into Dad.”
“Your father’s okay.” I must explain that aftermath is the stubble left after something is mowed down, and those days I was pretty much all aftermath of Stoat. I had lost all resentment of Georg; compared to Stoat, the man was an effing role model. Hacked down to the root emotions, cut off from embarrassment or inhibition, I felt like an open-backed hospital gown mentally as well as literally—a new experience to both me and my sons. They gawked at me.